New! We have upgraded these strips from the old HL1606 chipset to the
latest and greatest, the LPD8806 - a chip that has hi-speed full-color
PWM built in! The old HL1606-based strips did not have PWM built in
(they could only display 9 colors by default) the new ones can display 2
MILLION colors per pixel

These LED strips are fun and glowy. There are 32 RGB LEDs per meter, and
you can control each LED individually! Yes, that's right, this is the
digitally-addressable type of LED strip. You can set the color of each
LED's red, green and blue component with 7-bit PWM precision (so 21-bit
color per pixel). The LEDs are controlled by shift-registers that are
chained up down the strip so you can shorten or lengthen the strip. Only
2 digital output pins are required to send data down. The PWM is built
into each chip so once you set the color you can stop talking to the
strip and it will continue to PWM all the LEDs for you
We used to carry the HL1606 chipset LED strip - this is the most
common strip you'll find being made. The good news about the HL1606 is
that it is low cost and well understood. The bad news is that the HL1606
doesn't have PWM which means you can only set the LEDs on or
off. If you want any more colors than that you have to write to the
strip by hand to PWM it - a big pain and requires a lot of CPU and
doesn't look as good as it ought to! We wanted to upgrade the strip so
we had the factory make us an upgraded version using the LPD8806. This
chip has built in 1.2 MHz high speed 7-bit PWM for each channel -
that means it can do 21-bit color per LED (way more than the eye can
easily discern). Once you set the brightness level for the LEDs, your
microcontroller can go off and do other things, no need to continuously
update it, or clock it. The best part is that compared to the WS2801
which can only run one LED at a time, this chip can drive 2 RGB LEDs
which means the price stays the same as the older HL1606 strip, nice!
The strip is made of flexible PCB material, and comes with a waterproof
sheathing.
You can cut this stuff pretty easily with wire cutters, there are
cut-lines every 2.5"/6.2cm (2 LEDs each). Solder to the 0.1" copper pads
and you're good to go. Of course, you can also connect strips together
to make them longer, just watch how much current you need! We have a 5V/2A supply that should be able to drive 1 or more meters (depending on use)
They come in 5 meter reels with a 4-pin JST SM connector on each end.

To wire up these strips we suggest picking up some JST SM plug and receptacle cables.
If you want to connect to the input of a 5 meter cable (to wire it to power and a microcontroller) please get a plug connector. If you want to connect to the output, get a receptacle
cable. If you are getting a less-than-5 meter strip, you'll probably
want one of each to make it easy to connect and disconnect.

HL1606 LED controller chip with 'SPI'-like protocol (Chinese Datasheet)
We also have a link to the english datasheet but since the pinout is incorrect we don't know how trustworthy it is. YMMV. Remember, this is for the OLDER LED strip! We will try to get a LPD8806 datasheet up as soon as we can (we have to translate it from Chinese!)